The best of the weird: our favorite unusual 80s videos

Sunday

Jan 28, 2018 at 6:12 PMJan 28, 2018 at 6:12 PM

By Benjamin NunnallyTimes Staff Writer

Judging by music videos, the U.S. economy must have been great in the 1980s.

No concept was so strange that an executive wouldn’t throw a pile of money at it, hoping some of cash would stick and the resulting mutant would get extra airtime on MTV. It’s the only possible explanation for some of the videos that appeared during the era. Quality levels often teetered between “art project” and “last minute homework,” and some of the time (most of the time) the video had nothing to do with the song. In short, they were a good time to watch.

The resulting masterpieces have managed to stay wedged in our collective consciousness, and in turn, we’ve decided to share some of our favorite unusual, awkward and darn-near distressing videos from the 80s (that also feature great songs):

Scandal, 1984 — "The Warrior"

Imagine watching the home movies of a love child between the knife fight scene in Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” video and the zombie dance from “Thriller,” set to the wrong soundtrack. That’s “The Warrior,” featuring future solo artist Patty Smyth in a sewer/warehouse where mutant creatures dance their passions away. The song is excellent, penned by Holly Knight, author of “Love Is a Battlefield,” but the execution is insane. Smyth has a dance competition with what can only be described as some sort of “night man,' though they find love, or a grudging respect for one another — at least until the last shot, where her dance partner seems to seriously consider eating her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47y5bo8wtqM

Bonnie Tyler, 1983 — “Total Eclipse of the Heart"

The phrase “fever dream” gets thrown around a lot these days. Thankfully, “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is way worse than that. The video opens on Tyler’s haunted manor (for such a manor can only be haunted), where men with electric blue headlights for eyes go shoulder-to-shoulder with swim teams, ninjas, a dance troupe of Arthur Fonzarelli clones, football players and a breakdancing kitchen sink (we only made up one of those, have fun guessing which). The video comes across as a metaphor for the incredibly specific experience of attending a prep school where the only subject is hedonism, but the song is a classic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcOxhH8N3Bo

Peter Gabriel, 1986 — “Sledgehammer"

One day, Peter Gabriel cracked open “The Encyclopedia of Crazy Music Video Ideas” and decided he couldn’t pick a favorite gimmick for “Sledgehammer.” Like a kid in a bedtime story, he decided to do all of them at once, and the results are amazing: singing faces made of fruit, Gabriel projected onto an ice sculpture as it’s smashed, ready-to-cook chickens dancing in stop-motion animation — the list is impossibly long, but there’s no filler, is what we’re getting at. Gabriel’s sense of one-upmanship forces the ante higher until he finally collapses into a chair and presumably exits this reality to go back wherever he calls home.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g93mz_eZ5N4

Talking Heads, 1983 — "Burning Down the House”

Picture: David Byrne’s face, floating in an inky, black abyss, asserting in a chilling, staccato delivery, “I am an ordinary guy.” Meanwhile, in the titular suburban home, Byrne’s childhood self holds a concert for no one. Faces superimposed over Byrne’s mime the song’s lyrics with him in the void. This is true, Lynchian horror, and it’s only the first minute and a half of the video. That’s right: there’s more. David Byrne is known for being intentionally weird, so it’s fair to say that what we got is exactly what he planned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8D4AsLzlM0

Taco, 1983— "Puttin’ on the Ritz”

Witness an immaculately-dressed ghoul tease the homeless with his affluence, then toy with dead-eyed mannequins singing in synthesized voices while puppet people freeze to death and other shots of tourism films from Hades play. The video is arguably a smart satire on the nature of wealth and indulgence, but there’s a creepiness that calls to mind Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” here and there, which is fun to revel in. “Gotta dance,” Taco exclaims as he sweeps his cape over his shoulder, staring not into the camera, but the viewer’s soul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmSqhi5l9_k

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